World War II

World War II began in 1939 and lasted until 1945. Dividing the world between the Axis Powers—Germany, Italy and Japan—and the Allies, led by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, it was fought over numerous theaters in Western and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, Africa and the Middle East, and the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. The war ended in Europe with the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945 and in Asia when Japan surrendered on 15 August of the same year. More than fifty million people died during World War II as the consequence of genocidal acts such as the Holocaust, the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war's many military confrontations—the bloodiest taking place on the Pacific and European fronts.

The new technologies of war—atomic weaponry, jet aircraft, radar—contributed to World War II's effects on both military and civilian populations. Film technologies and film cultures likewise played significant roles. Although films were made during World War I, for both the Axis and Allied nations World War II was the first truly cinematic war: lightweight 16mm equipment was developed that gave unprecedented access to images of combat; world leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler all had personal projectionists who screened newsreels and documentaries as well as fiction films. And for both civilian and military populations on both sides of the conflict, film educated and entertained, communicated the progress of the war, and mobilized national feeling, as both Allied and Axis nations embraced cinema as a war industry.

FILM INDUSTRIES AND CULTURES
OF THE AXIS NATIONS

The Nazis took control of the German government in 1933. After their defeat in World War I and years of economic depression, Germans were vulnerable to Hitler's rhetoric of nationalism and racial purity, which blamed Communists and Jews for Germany's social and economic problems. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, was keenly interested in cinema. He over-saw the nationalization of the film industry, achieved over the next decade by acquiring controlling interests of German companies; in 1942 these holdings, as well as those of the Austrian and Czechoslovakian national industries, were consolidated in the Nazi-owned and -directed film company Ufa.

From 1933 onward, Goebbels took a personal interest in film production and previewed every film released. He consolidated governmental control further in 1936 by limiting film imports and banning all film criticism. Film criticism was replaced by Filmbeobachtung (film observation), wherein writers merely described content without comment on the quality. In addition, Goebbels endeavored to remove all Jews from the industry, as well as others with lives or beliefs unacceptable to Nazi ideology. Both Jews and non-Jews fled the German film industry in the 1930s.

Among those who sought refuge in Hollywood were directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Douglas Sirk and actor Conrad Veidt. Their influence on Hollywood film was as varied as their individual talents. But collectively, their impact was most notable in the translation of German expressionist aesthetics to the American screen, particularly in those adult thrillers that postwar French film critics would dub films noirs for their characteristically dark worldview and shadowy urban milieu. Billy Wilder directed one of the first noirs, Double Indemnity (1944), whose charismatic criminal couple, snappy dialogue, and stark visual style were highly influential.

Despite Goebbels's fascination with and control over film as a tool of indoctrination, most Nazi-produced films were anodyne entertainment. They were so free of overt political bias, in fact, that captured German films were screened in the postwar Soviet Union as trophies of victory, despite the sharp repression of most aspects of public culture during the final years of Stalin's leadership. But while screens were largely filled with the same comedies and musicals popular before the war, Germany also produced propaganda films for domestic and international distribution. In the early 1930s a number of fiction films focused on the opposition of Nazis and Communists, characterizing it as a generational struggle in order to appeal to younger audiences. In Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex, 1933), for example, a boy joins the Hitler youth despite the objections of his drunken Communist father; when his unsavory family life is replaced by the wholesome discipline of the Nazis, he gains a new identity and a new focus for his loyalty.

German also produced propagandist documentaries. Leni Riefenstahl directed the most famous of these, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and Olympia (The Olympiad, 1936). Made to commemorate the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in 1934, Triumph of the Will was a major production, with sixteen camera crews and sets designed to highlight Nazi power. It celebrated Nazi iconography and rituals in sequences marked by geometric precision and grandeur, its modernist aesthetic used to imagine the Nazi state as a beautiful and powerful mechanism for war. Widely distributed in Europe, Triumph of the Will was never shown in the United States, although a copy was held at the Museum of Modern Art. Americans first saw excerpts of Riefenstahl's film as sequences intercut into Frank Capra's documentary series, Why We Fight (1942–1944). Documenting the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, Riefenstahl's Olympia was meant to demonstrate both Germany's cooperation with—and its superiority over—competing nations. However, stellar performances by non-Aryans, such as the African American runner Jesse Owens, qualified its ability to validate Nazi ideology.

Shortly before Hitler announced publicly what he termed the "final solution" to Germany's "Jewish problem" in 1941, Germany distributed some explicitly anti-Semitic films. One of the most popular was the historical epic, Jud Süß (Jew Süess, 1940). Its titular villain is a Jewish businessman who corrupts and destroys all who know him; in its climax he rapes the film's heroine and tortures both her father and lover. After the war, its director, Veit Harlan, would be the only Nazi filmmaker charged and tried for war crimes. He was not convicted, despite substantial evidence that the film was used to undermine popular opposition to the Holocaust. Made with the same purpose but with less box office success, Der Ewige Jew (The Eternal Jew, 1940) was a pseudo-documentary account of Jewish corruption and conspiracy throughout history. Alongside films that portrayed Germany's enemies as worthy of complete annihilation were those that promoted nationalism and militarism: blut und boden (blood and soil) dramas. The most lavish of these was the historical reconstruction, Kolberg (1945). Also directed by Harlan, it was an epic account of Prussian resistance to the French during the Napoleonic Wars; Goebbels was especially interested in the project and diverted Nazi troops from battle to work as extras in the film. It was released in 1945, but Allied bombing of Berlin prevented its being widely seen by German audiences.

After Germany surrendered it was occupied by the Four Powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. They confiscated film holdings and decentralized the industry. Likewise, thanks to extensive lobbying on the part of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Occupation Statute of 1949 that created the Federal Republic of Germany also specified that no import quotas would protect its cinema from foreign—Hollywood—competition. Although there is some debate over just how much of the West German market Hollywood controlled after the war, it is clear that Hollywood took the opportunity to continue those distribution strategies declared illegal within the United States by the US Supreme Court's Paramount Decree of 1948, making West Germany a significant source of revenue. West German production was itself healthy but somewhat lackluster until the 1960s, when a new generation of young filmmakers rejected the generic entertainments of the past and called for a new German auteurist cinema.

Unlike the German film industry, Italian cinema during World War II remained for the most part privately funded. But Mussolini, like Hitler and Goebbels, recognized the significance of cinema to his political aims. His government provided support for production, and he kept close watch on all films produced. The majority of these, as in Germany, were pure entertainment: romances, melodramas, and comedies. The values of fascism were communicated primarily in historical epics, such as 1860 (Gesuzza the Garibaldian Wife, 1934) and Scipione l'Africano (Scipio the African, 1937), which provided opportunity to celebrate Italy's national pride and military prowess; overtly political films, however, were rare. Two exceptions were films made in honor of the Fascist Party's tenth anniversary: Camicia Nera (The black shirt, 1933), which dramatized the rise of fascism, and Vecchia Guardia (The Old Guard, 1934), which recounts a violent confrontation between fascists and socialists in 1922.

For the most part, mainstream Italian production favored screen fantasies with glamorous settings and situations, including romantic comedies and so-called "white phone" melodramas. The La Canzone dell'amore (The song of love, 1930) is characteristic of those films that set contemporary stories of emotional upheaval, love, and loss in brightly lit modernist interiors. Critics writing in journals such as Bianco e nero (White and Black) called for more realistic films to be made; in the early 1940s the aesthetic direction of Italian cinema began to shift. For example, Roberto Rossellini's documentary-influenced La Nave Bianca (The White Ship, 1942) anticipated neorealist cinema in its use of a hospital ship as its setting and medical corps staff and on-duty naval officers as actors. Likewise, Luchino Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), titled Ossessione (1943), utilized regional settings and dialogue for its story of ill-fated love.

In addition to such aesthetic innovations, developments in Italy's film industry during the war would contribute to its postwar status in international film culture. The Venice Film Festival, which was inaugurated under Mussolini's leadership in 1932, became annual in 1935, was discontinued in 1942, and then revived in 1948 (it was interrupted by student protests in 1968; and, between 1969 and 1979, editions were non-competitive), would become a model for festivals begun in Cannes and Edinburgh in 1946 as well as those established during the 1950s in Berlin, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, London, Moscow, and Barcelona. These festivals showcased postwar European cinema and were vital to the development of an international art cinema. Also important to Italy's postwar role in international film culture was the development of Cinecittà. Located in the southern part of Rome and designed to house all aspects of filmmaking, it was officially opened by Mussolini in April 1937. During the war it was the hub of Italian production. After the war, when Hollywood sought means to profit abroad despite protective legislation that froze a percentage of its assets, Italy's "Hollywood on the Tiber" became a key site for international co–productions and runaway productions.

On the Pacific front, World War II was shaped by Japan's imperialist ambitions. First signaled by Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1932 and confirmed by its invasion of China in 1937, those ambitions widened following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to include the entire Pacific as well as Southeast Asia.

With Japan's changing role on the world stage came significant changes in its film culture. Its film industry was one of the world's most successful and fully developed, largely consolidated in three vertically integrated companies that collaborated with one another to keep out competitors, including Hollywood. Yet despite the fact that the Japanese industry was unusually successful at competing with Hollywood, Hollywood film and film culture, along with Western fashions, jazz music, and modern dance styles, were important to the urban Japanese of the 1930s. All of this changed, however, when Japan joined the Axis Powers. Taking its cue from the Nazi use of cinema as part of Germany's plan for total war, Japan tightened its control over film content. American music, dancing, and fashions were banned from the screen; nationalist aims were given priority, and a censorship office was created to ensure adherence to new laws governing film content. Film's purpose was no longer simply to entertain, but to accurately represent Japanese national identity, values, and beliefs. In pursuing this goal, censors were alert to any omission or misrepresentation of Japanese culture. For instance, Yasujiro Ozu was the highly successful director of shomingeki, stories of the everyday life of the lower classes. But his script for Ochazuke no aji (Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, 1952) was rejected when he failed to include the traditional meal of red rice that wives fed to husbands departing for battle.

Japanese popular cinema of the 1930s included action-packed historical films (the jidai-geki) as well as a variety of genre films devoted to depicting contemporary life (the gendai-geki). These continued to be made but were increasingly directed toward the wartime goal of heightening national pride. During the early war years, the jidai-geki became less of an action genre and directed more toward depicting the power and grandeur of abstract values associated with military action, such as honor, duty, and self-sacrifice, as in Abe ichizoku (The Abe Clan, 1938). In the wartime epic Genroku Chushingura (The 47 Ronin), released in two parts in 1941, Kenji Mizoguchi recasts the familiar story in such a way that it focuses entirely on the nobility of sacrifice rather than on violence. The jidai-geki only recovered its fast-paced action orientation when young director Akira Kurosawa made Sugata Sanshiro ( Judo Saga) in 1943.

An important extension of the contemporary focus of the gendai-geki came in the form of battle and home-front films. Early war films such as Five Scouts (Gonin no sekkohei, 1939) and Tsuchi to heitai (Mud and Soldiers, 1939) focused less on violence than on the more routine aspects of battle, less on individual heroism than the work of the collective, with a style reminiscent of newsreel footage. But, significantly, representations of battle changed as Japan's global role changed, and films became more jingoistic after Pearl Harbor. Thus, the post-1941 films Mother of the Sea (1942) and Rikugun (The Army, 1944) are marked by overt signs of national and militarist pride—displays of armaments as well as literal and figurative flag waving of various kinds. In these terms, the bravura displays of nineteenth-century martial arts in Sugata Sanshiro might be read as not only the result of Kurosawa's auteurist tendencies—of which more would be seen in the decades to follow—but also as a sign of changing attitudes toward combat during the 1940s.

While war films depicted the changing attitude toward militarism, home-front films consistently celebrated small victories of ordinary people who bear their burdens with good cheer and unquenched patriotism, as in Hideko no shasho-san (Hideko the Bus Conductress, 1941). As in the wartime cinemas of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, home-front films are often a site for female heroism. However, distinct from those home-front films that focus on romance or maternal affection as an adjunct to or even a source of patriotic fervor for women, Japanese home-front films tended to downplay all relationships in favor of that between the individual and the nation. The exceptions were interethnic romance films, such as the hugely popular China Nights (Shino no yoru, 1940), which used heterosexual desire as a figure of Japan's imperialist ambitions: against the backdrop of war-torn Shanghai, a Chinese girl is rescued from squalor by a handsome Japanese officer and transformed from a headstrong and willful orphan to a dutiful—and typically Japanese—wife.

Following the US bombing of Japan and its consequent surrender in 1945, American forces occupied the devastated country under the command of General Douglas MacArthur and his retinue, known as SCAP—the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. With the goal of remaking Japan in such a way that it would cease to be a threat to Western democracies, SCAP was especially interested in the film industry as a purveyor of cultural identity and as a potential tool for cultural change. In addition to censoring what it considered dangerous topics of militarism and nationalism in prewar and wartime film, SCAP encouraged film content that it considered useful to the cause of democracy, including screenplays supporting women's rights and opposing militarism. Considered a significant aspect of Japan's transformation, the film industry was supported by the United States, although steps were taken to break down its centralized character. A time of rapid change and expansion, the decade of the 1950s is commonly considered one of Japanese cinema's most successful, a time when the domestic industry prospered despite the hundreds of American films that flooded the marketplace. Certainly, it was an era when auteurs such as Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi took their place as part of an international art cinema.

FILM INDUSTRIES AND CULTURES
OF THE ALLIES: GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE,
AND THE USSR

Although the initial response to the outbreak of war in Britain in 1939 was to close all cinemas, they soon reopened and film attendance grew steadily throughout the war years. In spite of shortages, the reduction of studio space available for feature film production, and increased taxation and the consequent increases in ticket prices, World War II was a prosperous time for British cinema.

General trends in film attendance were recorded in a survey undertaken for the Ministry of Information called The Cinema Audience, which showed that film outstripped newspapers and books in its ability to reach large segments of the population. Thus, the ministry's Films Division organized a program of both theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition, utilizing commercial cinema circuits as well as such other venues as churches, canteens, and even railway stations.

Given that the ministry's purpose was propaganda and information, most of the films commissioned by the Films Division were documentaries, and its "five minute films" were designed to fit easily into a program of feature film viewing. Their content varied from news to practical information, as in When the Pie Was Opened (1941), which used a variety of animation techniques to illustrate a recipe for making vegetable pie. But the Films Division also produced longer documentaries, such as what many consider the definitive document of the blitz, the Crown Film Unit's Fires Were Started (1943), directed by Humphrey Jennings. In some cases, it even funded commercial projects, such as Michael Powell's 49th Parallel (1941), a film that explained "why we fight." Scripted by Emeric Pressburger, it also explained—by bringing the war to America's doorstep—why Americans, too, should fight: a small band of Nazis stranded in Canada have a series of ideologically charged encounters with a French-Canadian trapper, an ethnically-German religious community, and an English intellectual who studies Native American cultures. In each encounter the opposition between democracy and Nazi ideology is made clear. Featuring two bankable British stars, Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier, as well as a strong dose of adventure, it made top box office in Britain and abroad.

Following the bombing of British cities in 1940 and 1941, filmmakers called for fewer war films because they believed that an exhausted public needed escape from battle. In 1942 the Films Division issued a statement regarding its willingness to balance production between war films and other types of propaganda, provided that the films produced were of a high quality and positively represented the British identity and the democratic way of life. Depictions of a popular war ensued, a war fought on a variety of fronts by a variety of ordinary British people. For example, The Foreman Went to France (1942) and Millions Like Us (1943) depicted the wartime experiences and contributions of factory workers.

The successes of wartime British cinema would carry over into the early 1950s. After Powell and Pressburger's success with 49th Parallel, they continued to work together; one of their most popular wartime films was the portrait of military heroism, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (The Adventures of Colonel Blimp, 1943). Still making films together in the 1950s, they constituted one of the most important creative collaborations in British cinema.

France was invaded by Germany in June 1940. The Nazis occupied Paris while a right-wing French government was established in Vichy. At the beginning of the Occupation, all films screened for French audiences were German productions. Some proved popular, including the anti-Semitic Jud Süß, but French audiences preferred French films, so domestic production was resumed in 1941. The Germans invested heavily in France's film industry, considering it both good diplomacy—to demonstrate the benefits of cooperation—and an investment in the future of a German-controlled European film industry. In the absence of films from its main competitor, Hollywood, French film enjoyed greater profits in the Occupation era than it had garnered before the invasion. Meanwhile, in the unoccupied zone, the Vichy government formed the Comité d'Organisation de l'Industrie Cinématographique (COIC) in 1940 to control film production. Both the scope of the COIC's distribution and its funding were limited, although it received support from the United States and Italy.

FRANK CAPRA
b. Bisacquino, Sicily, Italy, 18 May 1897, d. 3 September 1991

One of the most famous directors of the studio era—and one of the very few to have his name above the title—Frank Capra is best remembered today for a series of populist comedies he made in the 1930s, most notably Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941). Although his career before that was both prolific and varied, the comedies that pitted the little guy against corrupt institutions struck a responsive chord with Depression-era audiences.

Capra began his career in 1922, directing the independent short Fultah Fisher's Boarding House. Working his way into the industry, Capra became a comedy writer for both Hal Roach, for some of his Our Gang comedy shorts, and Mack Sennett, the recognized master of slapstick comedy. Capra then worked on three popular comedies starring the comedian Harold Lloyd, including Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) and The Strong Man (1926). But the pair parted ways when Lloyd decided to direct his own films. In 1928 Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, then a struggling studio, hired Capra as a house director. Directing twenty-five films for the studio over the next ten years, nine of which were made in the first year alone, Capra rose to preeminence at Columbia.

The early Columbia films were in a variety of genres, but the perky comedy Platinum Blonde (1931), starring Jean Harlow, was a defining point in Capra's career. The film marked the first of eight collaborations with the writer Robert Riskin. One of their collaborations, It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable as a working class journalist and Claudette Colbert as a spoiled socialist who find themselves thrown together on a road trip adventure, swept the Oscars^® and is recognized as one of the prototypes of the screwball comedy genre.

When the United States entered World War II, Capra joined the Army and produced a series of training films, the most important of which are seven collectively known as Why We Fight (1943–1945). Because Capra's Hollywood comedies were on one level entertaining pro-American propaganda, he proved adept at more overt political propaganda, bringing together a variety of cinematic techniques, clever editing, and a sure-handed manipulation of cultural iconography to sway Americans from their earlier isolationist stance and to motivate soldiers for battle.

After the war Capra's vision just as quickly seemed out of date, and he lost step with audiences. His later films failed to capture the success of his prewar work. Capra's major postwar film, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), reveals the director's loss of idealism and faith in the common man, as it requires the divine intervention of an angel to restore the hero's faith in American tradition and the masses.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), Why We Fight, 1: Prelude to War (1943), Why We Fight, 2: The Nazis Strike (1943), Why We Fight, 3: Divide and Conquer (1943), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

FURTHER READING

Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Glatzer, Richard, and John Raeburn, eds. Frank Capra: The Man and His Films. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975.

McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Barry Keith Grant

In both the Vichy and German zones during the Occupation, censorship of film content strictly forbade any mention of the war; furthermore, laws were passed in both regions to prevent the employment of Jews in the

industry as well as the screening of pre-war films with Jewish actors. In both zones the dominant genres were comedies and melodramas designed to avoid all references to contentious political topics. The departure or imprisonment of French film talent meant that a new generation of French filmmakers emerged during the Occupation, including Jacques Becker, who was active in the resistance movement; Henri-George Clouzot; Claude Autant-Lara; Jean Delannoy; and others. The most significant of these new directors was Robert Bresson, who made his first film, Les Anges du péché (Angels of the Streets), in 1943.

Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945) is undoubtedly the most famous film made during the Occupation. Like the "prestige" films made during the war, it was a costume drama with extraordinarily detailed settings and a multilayered narrative that created a densely textured world of nineteenth-century Parisian theaters and nightclubs. It shared with other productions of the Occupation, such as Jean Delannoy's L'Eternal retour (The Eternal Return, 1943), a sense of fatalism that scholars have read as a veiled response to the social and cultural changes brought by the Occupation.

After the Liberation ended the Nazi Occupation, numerous small production companies competed for France's market. In 1946 the prime minister signed an agreement with the United States to do away with prewar quotas, freeing up the market for competition among French producers—and from Hollywood. Within the year it became clear that French cinema needed support and protection. The government created the Centre National de la Cinématographie to regulate production, promote French film internationally, and organize festival entries. France established new quotas for American films in 1948 and made new development funds for film available in 1953. Altogether, these responses to Hollywood's overseas expansion set the stage for a revival of the French film industry, the economic context in which the French New Wave emerged.

While the film industries of most combatant nations made significant aesthetic and industrial changes to meet the needs of war information and propaganda, Soviet cinema was already committed to the cause of indoctrination. Governed by the policy of Socialist Realism, its cinema from 1935 onward was entirely dominated by the needs and requirements of the Communist Party: formal experimentation was banned and films were designed to educate and to provide role models appropriate to Communist ideology. World War II did nothing to change this, although historian Peter Kenez has observed that the opportunities afforded by the war—to depict some of the real suffering of Soviet peoples as evidence of Nazi treachery and the need for vengeance—offered a degree of representational freedom not otherwise associated with Stalinist film.

Prior to entry into the war, the Soviets made a number of anti-Nazi films, including Professor Mamlock (1938), in which the life of a Jewish surgeon is destroyed by the Nazis. Despite ideological opposition to the Nazis, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939 in an attempt to avoid invasion. The pact held Germany at bay until June 1941; by early 1942 areas west of Moscow were under Nazi occupation. The abuses suffered by those in this area would fuel much of the war-era film that followed, in which vengeance was a dominant theme.

The majority of these films were documentary accounts—or fiction films with strong documentary tendencies. The first newsreel appeared three days after the war began, and newsreels continued to be released every three days throughout the war, despite limited resources. The first documentary made from this newsreel material was Nasha Moskva (Our Moscow, 1941), which depicted the home-front preparation for siege undertaken by soldiers and civilians. Perhaps the most important documentary of the war was the one that followed, Razgromnemetskikh voysk pod Moskvoy (1942), which focused on German losses—its prisoners of war, its weaponry destroyed and discarded in the snow. Released in the United Kingdom and the United States under the title Moscow Fights Back, it won a New York Film Critics' award. In the documentaries that followed, Soviet filmmakers demonstrated a willingness to depict the pain and injuries of war unusual in World War II cinemas: its purpose was to stoke up Russian hatred of its enemy. For instance, in Alexander Dovzhenko's Bitva za nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu (Ukraine in Flames, 1943), he heightened the effect by intercutting captured Nazi footage—of smiling Germans—with images of suffering in the Ukraine.

Shortages plagued Soviet film production during the war and major studios were lost early on; when films could no longer be produced in Moscow and Leningrad, Mosfilm and Lenfilm moved to cities in Central Asia. In order to keep village soviets supplied with film during a time of limited resources, production shifted from full length to short films from 1941 to 1942; these were released in groups called the Fighting Film Collections. The shorts varied from documentaries to short dramas; the best known is called Pir v Girmunka (Feast in Zhirmunka 1941), directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, in which a Soviet woman feeds a poisoned meal to the occupying army. In order to assure the Germans that the food is wholesome, she eats with them and dies; her body is discovered along with the enemy corpses.

From 1942 onward, feature-length production was again possible; the majority of these were war films, including a number that dealt with partisan warfare. The key themes in these films were the happiness of Soviet life before invasion, the brutality of the Nazis, and the consequent necessity for courage and vengeance on the part of both men and women. A number of films showed graphic violence against women and children, including Raduga (The Rainbow, 1944), in which a newly delivered mother is tortured, a newborn baby is killed, and a young boy who tries to bring food to a prisoner is executed. Home-front films, like partisan war films, often featured female heroes, but instead of directly fighting the evil Nazis, they struggled as civilians to support the war effort.

After the war's end, Soviet film production dropped precipitously; by the 1950s, only four or five feature films were released each year. The reason for this appears to be that under Stalin the political demands upon scripts were so strict that few could be completed.

HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR

Following World War I, Americans entered into a period of profound isolationism. The US government, despite the escalation of what Americans called the European War, would remain neutral until 1941. But with the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, the Hollywood community politicized itself in advance of the government, a stance strengthened by the nearly complete elimination of the German market for its films. Without the worry of losing overseas profits, Hollywood from 1939 to 1941 released a number of anti-Nazi films, such as Warner Bros.' Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and MGM's The Mortal Storm (1940). As a result, Hollywood drew fire from isolationist groups in the United States. This culminated in a congressional investigation led by an anti-Semitic Republican. senator from North Dakota, Gerald Nye; his accusation of "fifth column" or Communist sympathies in Hollywood would be resurrected after the war, during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations between 1947 and 1954.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended US neutrality—and the Nye investigation. The alliance forged between Washington and Hollywood as a result of World War II was unprecedented, as Hollywood had functioned from the 1930s onward as a voluntarily self-regulated industry under the aegis of the Production Code Administration (PCA), whose standards for morality were designed to allow the Hollywood film industry to avoid costly interventions by state censors. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt made film into a war industry with the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Government Films; additionally, in 1942 he formed the Office of War Information (OWI) to oversee all government press and information services, including motion pictures. Its domestic arm, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, was a liaison between the government and Hollywood. Through an often complex process of negotiation between Hollywood and these government bodies, the ideals meant to be incorporated into the war film—abstract values such as heroism, selflessness, and the need for cooperation, as well as the more specific concerns of the OWI such as the desirability of purchasing war bonds—were added to the values and beliefs already promoted by Hollywood. Endeavoring to follow the guidelines provided in numerous memos and booklets, Hollywood studios still made comedies, musicals, dramas, romances, and action-packed adventure films, but they did so on behalf of the war effort.

Combat films such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Air Force, (1943) and Objective Burma (1945) were based on real events insofar as they concerned themselves with actual places and combat initiatives, but their purpose was to engage and inspire their audience as much as to inform. In doing so, they characteristically depicted an ethnically mixed group of US soldiers, metonymic of America's diversity, drawn together despite their differences by their patriotism—and by their hatred of a common enemy. In order to properly direct American hatred of its enemies, US combat films depicted Nazis as cold and efficient killers but tended to imagine the Japanese as bestial, subhuman—worthy of annihilation. Such simple representations of America's role in the war gave way, by its end, to more complex depictions of heroism, such as John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945), which withheld victory and emphasized values of tenacity and devotion to duty rather than unreflective assumptions of racial or national superiority.

BETTY GRABLE
b. Ruth Elizabeth Grable, St. Louis, Missouri, 18 December 1916, d. 3 July 1973

Betty Grable sang and danced her way through Hollywood movies from the age of fourteen. After signing with RKO in 1932, her most memorable roles were as the perky co-ed in films like Collegiate (1936), Pigskin Parade (1936), Campus Confessions (1938), and College Swing (1938). Her career took off in the 1940s, when she signed with Twentieth Century Fox and starred in the Technicolor musical Down Argentine Way (1940). A series of colorful, light-hearted star vehicles followed, each the definitive escapist entertainment for American civilian and military audiences during World War II: Moon Over Miami (1941); Footlight Serenade, Song of the Islands, and Springtime in the Rockies (all 1942); Sweet Rosie O'Grady and Coney Island (both 1943); Pin Up Girl (1944); and The Dolly Sisters and Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe (both 1945).

The US Treasury Department noted that she was the highest-paid woman in America, having made $300,000 for the year 1946–1947. This was not too surprising, given that she was the star for whose legs Fox purchased an insurance policy for a million dollars with Lloyds of London in 1940. This was most certainly a publicity stunt to launch its newest star, but it forecast what was to be Grable's best-known role during World War II—that of a pin-up girl.

Pinups, which featured idealized photos or illustrations of beautiful young women, revealingly dressed or (occasionally) nude, shown in a full-body pose, were ubiquitous in World War II visual culture. Featured on playing cards, greeting cards, calendars, matchbooks, tacked up to the walls of barracks, even hand-painted on flight jackets and the noses of planes, they formed a persistent visual presence in the lives of American soldiers. A number of Hollywood stars—like Gene Tierney, Ava Gardner, and Veronica Lake—were popular pin-ups, but the most famous and the most reproduced pin-up image was undoubtedly Grable's 1943 bathing suit photo, showing off her legendary legs. Unlike many pinups, such as the well-known photos of Rita Hayworth in a negligee kneeling in bed or that of Jane Russell reclining against a haystack, the Grable pinup did little to signify a narrative or prompt a particular fantasy. Petite in her high heels, with an almost too-large cluster of blond curls on top of her head, Grable appeared inviting and yet wholesome, sexy but not overly glamorous. With good reason, she called herself "the enlisted man's girl." Grable's pin-up image was designed to accommodate the viewer's need to dream and escape. A pocket Venus and all-American every girl, Grable's pinup was an accessible, and portable, piece of Hollywood fantasy.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Collegiate (1936), Pigskin Parade (1936), Campus Confessions (1938), College Swing (1938), Down Argentine Way (1940), Footlight Serenade (1942), Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943), Pin Up Girl (1944), The Dolly Sisters (1945), Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe (1945)

FURTHER READING

Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Martignette, Charles G., and Louis K. Meisel. The Great American Pin-Up. New York: Taschen, 2002.

Amanda Howell

Tenacity and devotion to duty were likewise central to homefront dramas. Generally speaking, these films constructed their representations of a cohesive nation—a homeland—around images of family and tended to identify the home front with the "good mother" who loves and protects. Since You Went Away (1944), an award-winning home-front drama, explored the life of a family that experiences the full range of privations and losses

associated with the war; at the hub of the household, the wife and mother dispensed good sense and affection to both her children and others. The film was an epic-length, studio-era film at three hours, and the extended family and its friends, like the combat group, appeared as a microcosm of America, bound by a common cause—and by maternal affection.

Whereas combat films and home-front dramas leavened propaganda with entertainment, other features retooled the pleasures of musical and comic entertainment for the purposes of patriotism. Important to World War II musicals was the way that popular songs linked musical fantasy worlds to everyday life during wartime—an effect heightened in films about "putting on a show," such as This Is the Army (1943). This film is structured around Irving Berlin's compositions, including "God Bless America"—a patriotic song so popular that it became the alternative US national anthem.

Comedies allowed both military and civilian audiences to laugh at the strictures of wartime. When popular entertainers donned uniforms, the resultant fish-out-of-water comedies like Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates (1941) and Bob Hope's Caught in the Draft (1941) poked fun at military discipline—and those incapable of embracing it. Home-front comedies offered the opportunity to make jokes about shared experiences—such as housing shortages, the comic premise for The More the Merrier (1943).

In addition to the role played by studios, some of Hollywood's best directors took their talents to the military, including John Ford, who was the chief of the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); John Huston, who was in the US Army Signal Corps; and William Wyler, who served as an Air Force officer. In their productions, they brought Hollywood storytelling techniques to bear on representations of key battles. One of the most effective was Ford's documentary, The Battle of Midway (1942), which offered an elegiac vision of America designed, like the combat film, to inspire as well as inform. Ford's remarkable technicolor combat footage, including the dramatic image of the US flag being raised in the midst of aerial bombardment, is accompanied by snippets of traditional folk music, intercut with narration meant to reflect the views of ordinary Americans.

Wartime cinema was not only accountable to the OWI's requirement to educate, inform, and inspire; it was also subject to the oversight of the Office of Censorship, whose responsibility was to clear foreign films for import and US films for export. While the OWI concerned itself with whether or not Hollywood's productions would help to win the war, the Office of Censorship was concerned with whether or not a film might benefit the enemy, either through breaches of national security or through impolitic representations of the US or Allied nations. Alert to any curtailment of already reduced overseas markets, Hollywood soon learned to avoid its once-commonplace comic ethnic types—at least of Allied nationals—and likewise to tread a fine line in representations of the US military in its service comedies, lest its films be blocked from foreign distribution for offering representations thought to endanger—or belittle—the war effort.

The work of the Production Code Administration was entirely separate from that of the OWI and Office of Censorship. However, when there was a clash between the goal of the OWI to inform the public regarding the purpose and progress of the war and that of the PCA to protect American audiences from representations it deemed immoral, the PCA moderated its stance, particularly in regard to screen depictions of violence. Prior to the war, the Production Code had required that combat be bloodless; but as other media such as photojournalism and radio delivered more graphic information to Americans than the Code allowed on screen, motion pictures came under pressure from their audiences and from the government to likewise provide more explicit

representations. In 1943 Roosevelt, in response to advice from the OWI, urged the military to cease its policy of withholding the most brutal images of war from newsreel coverage, including images of both enemy and American dead. John Huston tested the limits of documentary reportage in his film The Battle of San Pietro (1945) and made what is perhaps the most moving of the US war-era documentaries, a graphic representation of the battle for a small Italian village in which over one thousand US soldiers were killed. After the war, explicit newsreel footage of Germany's concentration camps was shown nationwide at the request of President Dwight Eisenhower, despite the fact that its horrific images of the Holocaust violated the Code.

In qualifying the moral authority exerted by the PCA, the government tacitly acknowledged the existence of an audience rather different from the one specified by the Code, an audience to be brought into full partnership with the war effort—and the war's losses—rather than one to be protected from images that might inflame or disturb. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood's relationship with its audience—newly prosperous and becoming rapidly more educated and suburbanized—would continue to change, one of many challenges the industry encountered in the postwar period.

SEE ALSO Censorship;Documentary;France;Great Britain;Holocaust;Italy;Japan;Propaganda;Russia and the Soviet Union;Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft);Violence;War Films

FURTHER READING

Aldgate, Anthony, and Jeffrey Richards. Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986.

Avisar, Ilan. Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Burch, Nöel. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. London: Scolar Press, 1979.

Chambers, John Whiteclay II, and David Culbert, eds. World War II: Film and History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Ehrlich, Evelyn. Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Hirano, Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Hull, David Stewart. Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Mancini, Elaine. Struggles of the Italian Film Industry under Fascism, 1930–1935. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Sato, Tadao. Currents in Japanese Cinema. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1982.

Welch, David. Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Amanda Howell